Xyne-related page edits after Powerpill, Bauerbill... discontinuation

Where should translations go?

Hi! I'm wondering where the Archwiki team wants new translations to go? On the page ArchWiki Translation Team I get the feeling that translations should be placed under archlinux.org. At the same time there are national wikis as well, at different stages of development. In my case this is archlinux.se, which only contains a few articles, and is generally lacking links to the main Wiki from what I can see. What is the policy on where to put translations?

Hi and welcome! I'm glad to know that the Swedish website has come back to life :) Since MediaWiki is _not_ designed to handle internationalization (it requires resorting to workarounds like the suffix one we're using here) the ideal goal would be to move each language to its own separate wiki, for ease of maintenance. So, in your case, all Swedish articles should now be moved to wiki.archlinux.se and replaced with interwiki links on at least the English page, e.g. [[sv:Huvudsida]]. -- Kynikos (talk) 15:23, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Ah, I forgot to mention that if you want to add an interlanguage link to a protected English page, you can just ask on its talk page, and it will be added by one of us admins as soon as possible! -- Kynikos (talk) 15:28, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

On a secondary note - poorly developed regional wikis might work as a black hole for new users (turned off from arch due to lack of documentation) if they do not link to the main wiki for untranslated topics. Ideally they should cover the entire topic tree, and link to the anglish main wiki for untranslated articles. Granted, most potential new users that find a poor regional wiki probably continue searching and eventually find wiki.archlinux.org, but not necessarily all of them.

That's why we must exploit as much as we can the native tool that MediaWiki offers for keeping the various local wikis linked with each other: interlanguage links (example above).

Until the Swedish wiki lacks important articles, at least its Main Page if not also other important articles should instruct Swedish users to search for missing content on the English wiki.

Text shift in discussion answers

I noticed that the discussion pages of the wiki, in order to indicate that the piece of text written actually answers a comment from a guy above, we are using colon to shift our answer. The problem appears on long discussions page (like the beginner guide, I'm coming from), when we answer to answers answering answers...

I think it would be better to use a @name statement: this indicates we are answering directly to the guy whose name is written. And this avoid left space waste (especially on mobile phones, I couldn't even read the whole thread on mine yesterday, because of the so long shift).
-- Wget (talk) 13:10, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

I admit that the @ method wouldn't be such a silly idea, it would work with short discussions, but it wouldn't allow branching out long discussions. On wide screens the "left space waste" is negligible, and on my phones (Android) the browser correctly manages to fit long discussions to the screen width, I don't understand why your phone can't do that ^^

VirtualBox article rewrite

I'm currently rewriting the VirtualBox article and I've some question about the latter.

In the Related section of that article, there is currently two different articles which are looking exactly the same regarding the subject they are dealing with:

Installing Arch Linux from VirtualBox: this one is really outdated and has been marked as is for ages. I think it could be removed. If you agree, could you request its deletion or do it by yourself (I think I haven't the required right to achieve that).

Also I've found a page dedicated to systemd services which are completely unrelated. I've found a service related to VirtualBox, I think the later should be removed from that section and integrated to the main VirtualBox article (this is what I'll do).

Hi Wget, thank you for your will to take on this task! After having a look at the current status of those articles, I agree that there are indeed many improvements that can be done:

I confirm that Installing Arch Linux from VirtualBox and VirtualBox Arch Linux Guest On Physical Drive practically cover the same topic, however they do it for two different purposes: the former allows installing Arch Linux on a physical drive from VB, the latter allows booting an already existing "physical" system from VB; IMO the best thing to do in this case would be to merge the two articles while keeping intact and clear the distinction of the two scenarios (i.e., some rewording would be required on VirtualBox Arch Linux Guest On Physical Drive); maybe a new title could be created for the merged article, and the old ones should be redirected there, not deleted.

About systemd/Services I think you're right, those units should be moved to the respective articles, if existing: if a list of services not provided upstream is required to keep track of the status of the respective packages, systemd/Services should be moved to the DeveloperWiki namespace and it should contain only a list of links to the articles where the services have been moved. It would be great if you could start a discussion on Talk:systemd/Services about this. Regarding the VB service you can safely move it to VirtualBox.

Thanks for your fast reply. I've just begun to make the adaptation, articles merge, we agreed on. But after spending some times to the article, I realized that the Wiki's style rules don't explicitly define how parts of commands that have to be adapted must be formated (or maybe I haven't found it yet ;-) ). An example is worth a thousand of words:

Wiki Monkey plugin - Fix old AUR links

Would it be possible to add checking for the package name in official repositories, if the package no longer exists on AUR (i.e. to automate this)? -- Lahwaacz (talk) 19:47, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

The short answer is yes. The long answer is that the problem is not limited to AUR 1.x links, but can be extended to any existing instances of the Pkg and AUR templates (check if the package has been moved in/out the AUR and possibly update the template); addressing it only for "old-style" AUR links would give me a feeling of incompleteness.

Of course this automation is dangerous and shouldn't be blindly relied upon, in fact the alternative text of the link is not necessarily the name of the package, and there is a chance that it corresponds to a name of an official package even though that's not the intended meaning.

Right, checking the "new-style" links/templates would also be helpful. The possibility of having a (complete) package link checker plugin sounds great!

If it's too dangerous to perform some tasks, consider providing more verbose output to speed up the manual checking. For example, when the link does not use the package name as its anchor text, the actual name of the package could be printed into the output:

Processing [https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=32917 msynctool 0.22]...
Couldn't replace: the link doesn't use the package name as the anchor text (package name is msynctool-stable)

The user could quickly see if it makes sense to go forward and just replace the link with a template, or if some additional intervention is required. Sometimes very little work is required (e.g. first letter is uppercase) and opening the link is really slow.